The present Single Entry Multiple Carrier Interface (SEMCI) evolved out of the need for independent insurance agents to submit information to multiple insurance carriers. Historically, agents were required to use forms and systems provided by each carrier. Information common to all carriers was re-entered for each carrier creating redundant work for agents. To reduce this redundant work, ACORD defined the EDI standard known as AL3 and SEMCI was adopted as an insurance industry approach.
AL3 is focused on the communication between insurance carriers, their agents and other trading partners and has been in use since the 1980's. This EDI standard is a common set of rules that allow separate computer systems to talk to each other, to communicate policy data, accounting data, claims data, and application data for personal and commercial insurance, surety and specialty lines. SEMCI was implemented as a batch-oriented, store-and-forward “Electronic Data Interchange” (EDI) model using a private computer network. Agents and carriers submit EDI transactions over a private computer network to a clearinghouse. The clearinghouse places transactions in the “mail box” of the appropriate party and delivers the contents of each party's “mail box” to them on request.
With the advent of the Internet and related Internet standards, secure business-to-business commerce over a public network is now a reality. The insurance industry seeks to exploit this capability and Real-Time SEMCI is an implementation of electronic business-to-business commerce for insurance. Real-Time SEMCI provides agents the ability to enter data once into their agency management system and transmit that data over the Internet to multiple insurance company systems. The receiving insurance carriers process the transactions and return replies to the agent. For example, agents can request and receive quotes or submit applications for insurance. The implementation of Real-Time SEMCI relies on ACORD's Web Transaction Interface standard and ACORD's XML Insurance And Surety Service Specification. The Web Transaction Interface standard prescribes the communication protocol for this business as HTTP and it specifies an HTML form tag name that will contain transactions. ACORD's XML Insurance And Surety Service Specification defines business transactions using the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) XML standard.
As is well understood by those possessing an ordinary level of skill in the pertinent art, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is a request/response application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTML is an authoring language used to create documents accessible via the World Wide Web (WWW) or (Web). HTML defines a structure and layout of a Web document by using a variety of tags and attributes. XML is a specification developed by the W3C especially for Web documents. XML allows designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a language for expressing stylesheets. It consists of a language for transforming XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents, and an XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics. An XSL stylesheet specifies the presentation of a class of XML documents by describing how an instance of the class is transformed into an XML document that uses the formatting vocabulary.
It is an object of the present invention to translate from ACORD's XML Insurance And Surety Service Specification format to ACORD's AL3 EDI file format, so that insurance information communicated over the Internet or by other means and can be processed in the ACORD AL3 EDI file format.
It is a further object of the present invention to translate from ACORD's AL3 EDI file format to ACORD's XML Insurance And Surety Service Specification format so that insurance information processed in the AL3 format can be communicated over the Internet or by other means in ACORD's XML Insurance And Surety Service Specification format.
It is a further object of the invention to reduce the time and the cost required to rate and quote insurance policies.